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January 2017 book: Demons & Dragons - The New Geopolitics of Terror (Routledge)

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Tuesday, 13 June 2017

European Defence: The Old Unreliables versus the New Contemptibles

“It is my Royal and Imperial command that you concentrate your
energies, for the immediate purpose, on one single purpose, and all your skills
and the valour of my soldiers to exterminate the treachery of the English and
walk over General French’s contemptible little army”.

Alphen, Netherlands. 13
June. The cat is out of the bag. Queen Angela suggested on 28 May, in the wake
of President Trump’s less than successful visit to NATO that “we Europeans have
to take our own [defence] fate into our own hands”. She also suggested that
America and Britain were now unreliable allies. On 7 June, the day after the
anniversary of D-Day, the European Commission launched a “Reflection Paper on
the Future of European Defence” which called for a “Security and Defence Union”
to be realised by 2025. Will it work?

Now, I can reasonably
claim to be somewhat of an expert on this subject as I wrote my doctorate at
the European University Institute in Florence on the issue, together with a
book for Oxford University Press, both of which are (of course) brilliant and
very reasonably priced. Add to them countless articles all of which can be said
to follow a similar theme of ‘for effing’s sake Europe get your effing defence
act together before it is too effing late’.
On the face of it, the ‘reflections’ paper is an important statement
designed to kick-start yet more discussions about the future of Europe’s
defence. The central tenet of the paper that Europeans really must do more and
spend more on their own defence is undeniable.

Taken together with the
2016 Global Strategy and the European Defence Action Plan, as well published plans
for a new European Defence Fund which came out the same day as the Reflections
paper, the EU is certainly not short of security and defence jaw jaw these
days. The Commission paper does not lack
for ambition. “This reflection paper considers the issues that matter for the
future of our security and defence. It does so by looking beyond current
debates and decisions. Instead, it considers underlying structural trends,
presents different scenarios of possible futures for European security and
defence by 2025, and maps our possible ways forward”. The paper then offers a
series of strategic and political ‘drivers’ supported by a convincing set of
figures to reinforce the central case of more Europe doing more defence.

Three EU Defence
Scenarios

The Commission offers
three scenarios. “Security and Defence Co-operation”, calls for a more
EU-focused security and defence effort, albeit on a voluntary basis. “Shared
Security and Defence” goes a step further and calls for greater financial and
operational “solidarity” and some form of defence integration, whatever that is.
“Common Security and Defence” calls for fully-fledged European defence
integration with a European Security and Defence Union to be realised, possibly
as early as 2025. It is this scenario which is the Commission’s real objective
as all three scenarios are embedded in a chapter entitled “Europe in 2025 –
Moving towards a Security and Defence Union”.

It is also the eventual creation
of a European Army for which this scenario implicitly calls that the logic starts
to become self-defeating and a cold reality “in russet mantle clad” begins to dawn. First, the paper rightly highlights the fact
that whilst the US spends 3.3% GDP on defence, the average across EU
member-states is only 1.34%, a figure inflated by the roughly 2% GDP spent on
defence by the UK, France, Poland and a couple of others. In other words, to make an ‘independent’ EU
security and defence union credible (and that is the ambition of the paper)
with all the forces, resources, infrastructures, headquarters, assets, logistics,
and enablers ALL EU member-states would need to spend at least between 3-4% GDP
on defence, even if the synergies the Commission claims for a common defence were
realised. And, by the way, the member-states would also be expected to give all
their defence money to some form of defence Commission. Funny that. NATO is
finding it hard to get most of the same states to spend 2% GDP on defence under
the agreed-to Defence Investment Pledge.
Any takers?

The paper also points out
that whilst the US currently spends €108,322 per soldier, sailor and airman on
equipment procurement and research and technology, EU member-states spend on
average only €27,639. In fact, the situation is even worse than the paper
suggests because some 90% of the EU figure is made up of Britain, France and
Germany alone. NATO is also having
trouble getting the same states to spend 20% of their annual defence budgets on
new equipment. To even begin to match the Americans each EU member-state would
need to spend upwards of 40% of massively increased defence expenditure on new
equipment each year. Again, under Commission planning member-states would also
be expected to provide the EU with all that money and decision-making powers
over defence planning and decide which defence industries in which to invest as
well as those to cut. Any takers?

The paper also includes
the UK in its figures. Britain has now
triggered Article 50 to leave the EU by 2019, and even if there is a
transitional period by 2025, which is the date the Commission is targeting for
a European Security and Defence Union, Britain will no longer be in the EU.
Without the UK the figures the Commission bandies around in the paper become
less fact and more a great work of European fiction. As NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg
said in March, the hard reality for an EU that seeks to take on the mantle of
defending Europe is that “…collective
defence in Europe is NATO’s main responsibility and especially after Brexit I
think it’s obvious that we need NATO and the European Union working together,
not competing, because 80 % of NATO’s defence expenditure will be non EU”.

Ultimately the paper
fails precisely because it identifies the enormity of the security and defence
challenges Europeans face and in so doing unwittingly confirms that security
and defence can only be provided by a strong transatlantic alliance. That means
an adapted NATO should and must remain the epicentre of Europe’s security and
defence, albeit in close partnership with the EU. It will be an adapted NATO
that takes as its start-point not the creation of European Security and Defence
Union, but rather the equitable sharing of risks and burdens with the US and
Canada (Ottawa last week committed to spending 2% GDP on defence by 2025).

Defending Europe or dismantling
it?

In conclusion, the
Commission’s reflection paper is wholly unrealistic even as a premise for a discussion
over the short to medium term future of European security and defence. As such
it is yet another doomed-to-fail attempt to re-create the failed 1952-1954
European Defence Community. The likely outcome of this demarche will be some form of hybrid common and collective force
which would see European states pooling and sharing far more of their defence
effort, and in so doing making them ever more interdependent. On the one hand this
would be good, but come a crisis all member-states of the future British-less EU
7 would need to agree to its use. Agile? Responsive? No chance.

There is nothing
intrinsically wrong about the EU considering its role in the future defence of
Europe. The problem with this paper is that it is has everything to do with the
Euro-federalist ambition to replace the nation-state and very little to do with
the sound defence of Europe. Indeed, for the Commission’s vision of a European
Security and Defence Union to be realised it would need a fully-fledged
European government. I wonder who that might be. Consequently, this latest attempt to lead
Europeans to defence ‘independence’ from the Americans would result at best in
a contemptible European army, held in particular contempt by those two Old
Unreliables American and Britain, and dismissed with disdain by Russia, China
and much of the rest of the world.

There is a twist to ‘ESDU’. It might actually help strengthen European defence if it goes no further than ‘Security and Defence Co-operation’ or ‘Shared Security and Defence’, especially if by promoting synergies it helps Europeans achieve NATO’s 2%/20% Defence Investment Pledge. However, for that aim to be realised the EU would have to accept that its defence ambition must go no further than becoming the European pillar of the Alliance, and ultimately during crises subordinate to it. Any takers?

The question the paper
poses is the right one; how to get Europeans to generate more defence. The answer,
sadly and irresponsibly, as is so often the case when the Commission uses
defence as a means to a super-state end, completely wrong.

About Me

Julian Lindley-French is Vice-President, Atlantic Treaty Association, Senior Fellow of the Institute of Statecraft, Director of Europa Analytica & Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow, National Defense University, Washington DC. An internationally-recognised strategic analyst, advisor and author he was formerly Eisenhower Professor of Defence Strategy at the Netherlands Defence Academy,and Special Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of Leiden. He is a Fellow of Respublica in London, and a member of the Strategic Advisory Group of the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington.
Latest books: The Oxford Handbook on War 2014 (Paperback) (2014; 709 pages). (Oxford: Oxford University Press) & "Little Britain? Twenty-First Strategy for a Middling European Power". (www.amazon.com)
The Friendly-Clinch Health Warning: The views contained herein are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any institution.